The joke doing the rounds on social media is that after making the Premier League look easy with four titles in five years, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has built himself a challenger by sending Mikel Arteta, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko to Arsenal.
With the former Man City assistant in charge, and two former City title winners in the team, Arsenal are top of the table, and what began as a positive start to the new season is looking more and more like a title charge with each passing week. There is a long way to go, particularly for a team that hasn’t been considered contenders for the best part of a decade, but it’s now 12 wins from 13 games in all competitions.
Arsenal and City would have met at the Emirates this week had it not been for Arsenal’s rearranged Europa League tie with PSV Eindhoven, but Guardiola doesn’t need to meet face-to-face to know that Arteta, Jesus and Zinchenko are a threat. He’s already seen enough.
“Arsenal is back,” he said last month. “I think Arsenal are already there, after many years [they] were not there. With the patience with Mikel [who] changed not just the team but the club. This is already a factor and they are already contenders. He changed the team, but not just the team, the club itself.”
Arsenal’s decision to stick with Arteta — Guardiola’s No. 2 at City for three-and-a-half years — during occasional periods of fan unrest since his appointment in December 2019, and also spend nearly £80 million on Jesus and Zinchenko in particular, has already been vindicated with their best start to a season since 1904-05. A team which was aiming to finish in the top four for the first time since 2016 has now set their sights much higher, and there are supporters dreaming of a first title since Arsene Wenger’s last in 2004.
It’s a club that, as Guardiola has pointed out, has not been that used to winning and although Zinchenko and Jesus weren’t the only summer signings — their total spend was close to £120 million — it was important for Arteta to bring in players with experience of lifting trophies. In Premier League terms, there’s no better place to look than Man City.
